Knowledge And Decisions

What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less. A primitive savage must be able to produce a wide variety of goods and services for himself, and a primitive community must repeatedly duplicate his knowledge and experience in innumerable contemporaries. By contrast, the civilized accountant or electronics expert, etc., need know little beyond his accounting or electronics. Food reaches his local supermarket through processes of which he is probably ignorant, if not misinformed. He lives in a home constructed by an involved process whose technical, economic, and political intricacies are barely suspected, much less known to him. His home is likely to be stocked with many devices working on mechanical and electrical principles which he neither understands theoretically nor can cope with as a practical matter. The chronic complaints and scandals about appliance, automobile, and other repair services testify to the civilized man’s utter lack of knowledge of the everyday apparatus on which he depends. A primitive savage could never survive knowing so little about the production and use of spears, grass huts, or with such utter naiveté about which berries are poisonous, which snakes dangerous, or the ways and means of coexistence in the same jungle with lions, tigers, and gorillas.

Civilization is an enormous device for economizing on knowledge. The time and effort (including costly mistakes) necessary to acquire knowledge are minimized through specialization, which is to say through drastic limitations on the amount of duplication of knowledge among the members of society. A relative handful of civilized people know how to produce food, a different handful how to produce clothing, medicine, electronics, houses, etc. The huge costs saved by not having to duplicate given knowledge and experience widely through the population makes possible the higher development of that knowledge among the various subsets of people in the respective specialties.

THE MEANING OF “KNOWING”

Although the phrase “ignorant savage” may be virtually self-contradictory, it is a common conception, and one with a certain basis. The savage is wholly lacking in a narrowly specific kind of knowledge: abstract, systematized, knowledge of the sort generally taught in schools. Considering the enormous range of human knowledge, from intimate personal knowledge of specific individuals to the complexities of organizations and the subtleties of feelings, it is remarkable that one speck in this firmament should be the sole determinant of whether someone is considered knowledgeable or ignorant in general. Yet it is a fact of life that an unlettered peasant is considered ignorant, however much he may know about nature and man, and a Ph.D. is never considered ignorant, however barren his mind might be outside his narrow specialty and however little he grasps about human feelings or social complexities. We do sometimes refer to a “learned fool,” but the notion of a “fool” implies deficiencies in the reasoning process (so that one is easily deceived or fooled), whereas it may actually be knowledge that is lacking, so that the “learned” person has simply not learned enough outside a certain sliver of human experience.

The point here is not simply to deplore the use of certain words. The point is to avoid having our own discussion of knowledge drastically shrunk, arbitrarily, and virtually without our realizing what is happening. We need to consider the full breadth of knowledge and its depth as well. That is, we need to consider not only how much we know, but how well we know it.